The (Old) Solution to our Two Dominant Troll Cultures

From The Constitution of Knowledge, by Jonathan Rauch (2021):

We are in for a fight against two insurgencies: the spread of viral disinformation and alternative realities, sometimes called troll culture, and the spread of enforced conformity and ideological blacklisting, sometimes called cancel culture. One is predominantly right-wing and populist, the other predominantly left-wing and elitist. One employs chaos and confusion, the other conformity and social coercion. But their goals are similar, and often, weirdly, they act as de facto allies.

What troll culture and cancel culture have in common is that they are techniques of what propaganda experts often call information warfare. Rather than using rational persuasion to seek truth, they manipulate the social and media environments for political advantage. They may appear marginal, disorganized, or unhinged, but they are aggressive, expansionary, and rooted in a sophisticated understanding of human cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. They have captured commanding institutional heights, including (for four years) the White House and substantial parts of academia. They exploit the capabilities of digital technology to amplify their speed and reach. But they have also engendered encouraging pushback, as awareness of the methods they use and the dangers they pose has grown.

How do we protect ourselves from these trolls? We need to sustain and defend our most maligned and most important principle: Free Speech. Rauch explains:

The miracle is how robust free expression and liberal science have proved to be, despite unremitting attacks from every direction over hundreds of years. The idea that obnoxious, misguided, seditious, blasphemous, and bigoted expressions deserve not only to be tolerated but, of all things, protected is the single most counterintuitive social principle 'A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It”

In all of human history, every human instinct cries out against it, and every generation discovers fresh reasons to oppose it. It is saved from the scrapheap of self-evident absurdity only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social principle in all of human history. Those of us who favor it, and also our children, and also their children and their children, will need to get up every morning and explain and defend our counterintuitive social principle from scratch, and so we might as well embrace the task and perform it cheerfully.

Constitution of Knowledge, pp 17-19.

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The Consequences of Not Belonging to any Political Tribe

What is it like to not feel part of any political tribe? Mostly, it is to be dismayed to hear lies from the right and then lies of the left. It is to have a seat near the net of the tennis court, looking to the left, then the right, over and over, as lies are zinged back and forth. The party in power now, the Democrats, are certainly doing their part, whether it be immigration, COVID, Russia-Trump, abolishing the police will keep cities safer. And now there is the Democrat claim about Biden's economic package:

They are insisting that their plans, which are still in flux but amount to a call for some $4 trillion in spending over two bills, have no real costs at all—or that the costs should not be factored in, because they are "unfair and absurd."

As if $4 trillion will not risk massive inflation. As if $4 trillion will be completely paid for.

I'm not taking a position on whether parts of these packages make sense for the U.S. My concern is that the risks of these packages are being actively suppressed. I have very little respect for Joe Manchin, but I think he's correct when he claims that the current proposal amounts to "fiscal insanity." We are not having any meaningful national conversation about what is really in these bills and the extent of economic risk of committing $3.5 trillion to those things.  This, from the remorseless political party that threw the working class overboard decades ago.

This is simply the most recent example of a system that is completely broken with no hope of repair. It's a system where big corrupt campaign money and ideology drive the decisions, where inconvenient truths are ignored and suppressed and where most voters line up in ignorance to cheer their respective teams.

In four years, we might see the Republicans taken over, with their own brand of fiscal and ideological insanity. I truly see no end in sight.

This is the sort of thing that led George Carlin to indicate that he no longer had "a stake in the outcome."  I wish I could claim that everything is going well for our country, but I can't.

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The Need for Curiosity to be Nurtured in Colleges

John Tomasi, the President of Heterodox Academy, urges that the deep goal of the university should be to honor curiosity. We should give curiosity free reign at universities, giving it a priority over other important goals such as truth and justice:

The primary demand of curiosity is that it be allowed to roam free. What’s more, by its very nature, curiosity recognizes only boundaries that it sets for itself. Individual by individual, working-group by working group, curiosity stakes out and claims possession of its own domain. But even this sells curiosity short. Curiosity is an inveterate transgressor of boundaries. After all, none of us can know with certainty where another person’s curiosity might lead. Disciplinary boundaries and ideological ones too: No fence can stop curiosity. It slips past every wall.

And yet, unlike truth or justice, curiosity finds its imperatival power precisely in its own gentleness. Consider the phrase: “I wonder why…?” In its quiet and unassuming way, this expression of curiosity depends on no reason or justification beyond itself. Instead, curiosity is justified simply because, and wherever, it is expressed.

While this self-justifying power attends expressions of curiosity everywhere, the status and power of curiosity is amplified by the special conditions of university life. On campus, whenever a colleague or a student leads with a sincere expression of curiosity — “I wonder whether…” — that expression has the ability to stop and turn even the weightiest conversation, like an Archimedean lever. And woe to any authority figure who fails to honor the insistent force of curiosity. Teachers or scholars who discount sincere expressions of curiosity — say by ignoring an inconvenient question, or by belittling the person asking it — reveal themselves as pretenders, as bullies and frauds, in the kingdom of learning. Fail to honor curiosity, even for a moment, and the mask of authority melts from your face.

For all these reasons, I suggest that the practice of curiosity is a sacred value, the highest of goals, for learning communities of all kinds — high schools, colleges, and research universities too. In all such places, curiosity arises, and asserts its imperatival claims, prior even to the concepts of truth and justice.

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Attack on Academic Freedom by Israeli Diplomat and Congressional Democrat

As Glenn Greenwald points out, to believe in free speech requires that we believe in free speech for everyone regardless of their point of view. UNC Ph.D. student Kylie Broderick has lost her job because her University failed to take a principled stand on free speech.

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How Serious are you about “Follow the Science”?

Sometimes science hurts. Are you really willing to follow the science? Here is a bellwether test from Geoffrey Miller:

Here's the evidence for the blank slate crowd: "Genetic variation, brain, and intelligence differences," Molecular Psychiatry, February 2021.

Twin and family studies report that genetic differences are associated with individual differences in intelligence test scores (Box 2). If studies from all ages are taken together, genetic differences account for about 50% (standard error [SE] about 2%) of the variation in intelligence [24]. Higher heritability (see Glossary) estimates are found in samples of adults (where it can be 70% or slightly more) than in children (where estimates as low as 20–30% have been reported) [24,25,26,27]. The finding that intelligence is heritable has been replicated across multiple data sets sourced from different countries and times [28]. Our emphasis herein is on results from the newer, DNA-based studies rather than on traditional twin and family studies.

DNA-based studies have shown that a pattern of hierarchical variance is evident at the genetic as well as the phenotypic level. Using genomic structural equation modelling [29] it was found that a genetic general factor explained, on average, 58.4% (SE = 4.8%, ranging from 9 to 95% for individual tests) of the genetic variance across seven cognitive tests in people with European ancestry. This provides some support for the idea that the phenotypic structure of intelligence is in part due to genetic effects that act on a general factor of intelligence and also at more specific cognitive levels.

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